


Transeunt

by Eon-Flamewing (eonflamewing)



Category: Samurai Warriors
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, Horseshoe Crabs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eonflamewing/pseuds/Eon-Flamewing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History does repeat itself, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transeunt

**Author's Note:**

> So I was doing readings for biology and got to horseshoe crabs. This is the result. (Crabs are sad, okay.)

He remembers watching them, once upon a time. 

He remembers seeing hundreds of them swarming upon the beach, the water on their shells gleaming in the moonlight. A scene filled with the scrabbling of chitin into wet sand, of movement and flattened hemispheres scuttling here and there, all layered over by the whispering sea breeze and the gentle, omnipresent wash of the waves. A secret ceremony of an equally secretive species, witnessed only by luck and years of painstaking research.

He remembers watching them for hours, fascinated by the way they move - not quite sideways, not quite forwards - and how they scythed through the water upside down, tail trailing and scoring meandering lines of ripples. He remembers a night spent camping under airy tents without candles, the surroundings illuminated only in shades of silver, and the air flecked with salt.

And he remembers someone who accompanied him, someone who was unfamiliar in all aspects save for his voice. A voice who had called him son.

(It's just as well, though. He never did see that man's face.)

This memory has been with him for a long time. Perhaps far too long. It's a place he knows intimately by memory, but has never truly found. The coastline curves differently, now, and the trees are gone - replaced by neon lights and concrete wharves, stifling the soil below. The beach has disappeared, too, smothered by concrete and buildings stacked carelessly like bricks. 

He didn't know what those creatures were until he was old enough to read, when he finds a picture of one in a catalogue of animals. Horseshoe Crab.  _Tachypleus tridentatus._  Many-legged trident. Arthropod. Living fossil. They cross his path a few more times as time rolls on, first as a presentation assignment, then as a research project, and finally as an internship rotation. Though he never saw a live one again - all that is left of them are pictures. Text, even. The closest that has come to it is a small vial filled with blue liquid.

_It is well known that horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin in their blood to carry oxygen. Due to the copper present in hemocyanin, their blood appears blue. This blood contains a cell type named amebocytes, which play a similar role to white blood cells of vertebrates in defending the organism against pathogens. Amebocytes are used to make Limulus amebocyte lysate, which is used for the detection of bacterial endotoxins in medical applications. The blood of horseshoe crabs is harvested for this purpose._

He's seen this in action, pipetting the pale blue solution from one Eppendorf tube to another, then into a dish of samples. Some coagulated, some did not. The results are written down and filed away, left in a cabinet that his superiors never really touched. 

The internship is finished in due time. He finds himself standing upon a stage, giving a graduation speech to people who have been with him for six years, and then handing the microphone over to a wizened professor who later piled compliments upon him that were (intentionally or unintentionally) meant for his father. A father who he remembers seeing more in dreams than reality.

He returns from work every night to a house with no lit lights. As usual, he takes a shower, fixes some late dinner, and goes back to his room to pursue his readings. The other three doors are never opened - there is no need. At least, not anymore.

And the memories always come back. Especially after midnight, when one day begins blending into the next, in those early mornings with silence so intense that even one's own pulse can be heard. Some come as snatches of shattered images, others are eerily familiar voices speaking words with too little context. Most of them don't make sense.

He remembers wearing clothes that he does not own, consulting maps with archaic boundaries which have long since been overwritten, and giving orders to people who no longer exist. He remembers a time which most of his peers have forgotten, a time filled with uncertainty, a time filled with strife. A time of clashing ambitions, a time dictated only by the foolishness of men. A time that had always been running out. 

 _Itsukushima. Iyo. Kozuki Castle. Bichu-Takamatsu._  It took him a few years to find out what these words meant. Sometimes he wakes up and forgets to remember that those are just dreams. Not his memories. But it's hard to remember that all the time, especially since they belonged to someone who looked exactly like him.

Sometimes he looks in the mirror and is surprised by his own appearance. For a moment, he sees someone else looking back at him, dressed in elaborate orange and blue. But the difference is just in the clothing - their faces are the same, and their grey eyes both carried a weight far beyond their age. He always raises one hand to touch the mirror, and his reflection does likewise. 

_You're alone too, aren't you?_

And when he blinks, the image shifts, and they are identical once again.

His classmates remark off-hand during history class about their curiosity regarding how the people of that era managed their politics. Some marvel at the Demon King's sheer ambition, and compare him to other conquerors who instilled as much fear into their opponents. Others look at a timeline tacked onto the wall, and point out how easily clans rose and fell at the whims of chance. There are a few who analyzed the various diplomacy methods, and express gratitude that hostages and concubines have since become a thing of the past. 

And he merely smiles, nodding at their words. After all, he knows these tragedies all too well.

The memories never do really go away. On some days he abruptly awakens with pain tugging at his chest before he remembers that there is no ambush and that his father is already dead. On other days he dozes off on the train and misses his stop because his ears are tuned for another destination. And when he has had too little tea and the ward rotations drag on past midnight, he starts calling his colleagues by the names of long-gone men.

He stays up on particularly bad nights writing down the names of people he once cared for. People who had put their trust in him, just like how others had trusted another, so long ago. Did  _he_  feel the same, too? The dull ache of grief at lives that could have been saved, at battles that could have been won? They are both waging wars, but against different opponents. At least  _he_  had tangible enemies, and those enemies could become allies. He's left facing something that chewed at people and sometimes devoured them whole; something that picked its victims at random, without any care for rank or morality. Perhaps it was better to fight other humans than a faceless corruption that slays from within.

_Harvesting horseshoe crab blood involves collecting and bleeding the animals, and then releasing them back into the sea. Most of the animals survive the process; mortality is correlated with both the amount of blood extracted from an individual animal, and the stress experienced during handling and transportation. Estimates of mortality rates following blood harvesting vary from 3-15% to 10-30%._

Maybe his term as a doctor is fated. After all, his duty had always been to ensure that no one would die -  _he_  had done so on the plains of war, and now he is doing the same amidst fluorescent-lit halls. But the goal this time is nowhere in sight. Unlike  _him_ , he no longer has anything grand to strive for. No clan to watch over, no family to protect, no unifying quest to follow- only empty rooms and dimmed hallway lights, plotting charts and monitoring graphs one by one. Month after month of plastering on too-pleasant facades, of dealing with unruly patients (every bit as taxing as enemy commanders), of spraying disinfectant on yet another now-vacant bed. And at the end of the day, not everyone gets out alive. Surgeries are as red as battlefields - but at least the latter held possibility of being averted. Once a tumour spreads too far, it's either excision or death.

They say that peace brings respite to the hearts of men, but it has only caused another set of problems. Worries about survival are whittled down and smashed, producing myriads of shards which are just as capable of weighing down the soul. In the past, all that mattered were events and happenings in the immediate region. Now, the interconnections of the world funnels misery across the globe. 

So here he is, alone and locked into a cycle of forced selfless giving. Is this what  _he_  had felt, in those final years? In a land finally at peace but not at all healed, bogged down by endless streams of paperwork and watching over the graves of his family and friends? The most pressing issues are gone, yes, but in its place comes a whole slew of smaller problems. And one man can only hold so much before he breaks.

On the anniversary of his parents' wedding, he visits the garden where they had proposed and leaves a bouquet under the cherry tree. The ground is carpeted with petals, a whole sea of pink interrupted only by four white dots sheltering beside a particularly large root. He catches a few blossoms, picking them from the air, and makes a mental note to press them between some of his medical texts. They would go on the journal kept at home - a leather-bound volume slowly expanding from the assorted objects that filled its bindings. Twenty sides, now - a page for every year.

Eventually he does find something close to that very first memory. A secluded estuary three hours' drive from the city, in a nature reserve that had stubbornly clung on to existence all these years. He takes the aging car out and fills the boot with what he remembered was present, eventually reaching a sand bank mottled with grass. Night falls, and as predicted the water begins to ripple - but the pilgrims are scarce. Only a dozen appear, a far cry from the swarming of their ancestors. They go about their business, just as in his memory, but their vigour has long since been bleached by the passage of time. 

One crawls too close to him, and he tries to shoo it away back to its fellows. Somehow, it fumbles in confusion and tips over, jointed limbs waving frantically. Even in the moonlight, he can see the scars marking its underside - a thin incision ending in a puncture mark, where a catheter had been inserted, taken out, and the wound sewn together.

This time, there is no voice to tell him not to disturb the crabs. He flips the creature over, careful to avoid its legs, and it scuttles away into the water. After a while its companions follow, disappearing one by one into the sea. All that is left is a line of concentric ripples, tracing a path out to the open ocean.

If only he could do the same.


End file.
